Credit: ITER
Nuclear fusion has been pursued for decades, but is it now ‘time to drop the old joke that fusion is 30 years away, and always will be’ as the author suggests?
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Commercial nuclear fusion has gone from science fiction to science fact in less than a decade, claims The Telegraph.
Even well-informed members of the West’s political class are mostly unaware of the quantum leap in superconductors, lasers, and advanced materials suddenly changing the economics of fusion power.
Britain’s First Light Fusion announced last week that it had broken the world record for pressure at the Sandia National Laboratories in the US, pushing the boundary to 1.85 terapascal, five times the pressure at the core of the Earth.
Days earlier, a clutch of peer-reviewed papers confirmed that Commonwealth Fusion Systems near Boston had broken the world record for a large-scale magnet with a field strength of 20 tesla using the latest high-temperature superconducting technology. This exceeds the threshold necessary for producing net energy, or a “Q factor”, above 1.0.
“Overnight, it basically changed the cost per watt of a fusion reactor by a factor of almost 40,” said Professor Dennis Whyte, plasma doyen at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The March edition of the IEEE Transactions on Applied Superconductivity published six papers ratifying different aspects of the technology.
The magnets are used to fuse hydrogen isotopes by squeezing super hot plasma inside a tokamak device. The temperature must be ten times hotter than the surface of the sun in order to replicate solar fusion because the Earth’s magnetic field is that much weaker.
The “old” low-temperature magnets are made of niobium alloys operating near absolute zero at -270C. The new magnets lift the temperature from 4 kelvins to 20 kelvins using rare earth barium copper oxide (ReBCO) with a radical new design. They combine superconductivity with extreme magnetic power. This leverages a “multiple order-of-magnitude increase” in fusion capability.
Commonwealth’s chief executive, Bob Mumgaard, told me the game-changing technology scarcely existed 10 years ago, and was still in its infancy five years ago. “The breakthrough is in superconductors. Much stronger magnets mean that we can build a plant that is 40 times smaller,” he said.
It is time to drop the old joke that fusion is 30 years away, and always will be. A poll at the International Atomic Energy Agency’s forum in London found that 65pc of insiders think fusion will generate electricity for the grid at viable cost by 2035, and 90pc by 2040.
The Washington-based Fusion Industry Association says four of its members think they can do it by 2030. If the industry is anywhere close to being right, we need to rethink all our energy assumptions. Britain’s planned gas plants are rendered obsolescent almost before they are built.
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Britain is going gangbusters on all fronts, a legacy of ITER’s Joint European Torus project at Culham, but also a feat of leadership. “Of all the countries in the world, the UK is most aggressively pursuing fusion power,” said American scientists Matthew Moynihan and Alfred Bortz, co-authors of Fusion’s Promise.
Full article here.
Tallbloke's Talkshop 
Huh, and cost ? SO better to SAVE NOW and not spend oodles on Wind n Solar junk ( to be scrapped / processed )
It is now 29 years, not 30.
Totally delusional. The materials and system capable of matining the plasma for any significant period, the amount of energ and material required to create and extract fusion enrgy is simply not practical or feasible. THere is no current way to even extractebrgy, ITER won’t be able to do that.
. Fission is far cheaper and more energy dense per unit resource. The Sun only works because it has the massive gravity to hold it all together, at 10-20M Deg. Earth doesn’t. The Tokamak needs 200Million K.
It just an acedemic boondoggle going nowhere. There was a recent discussion on this organised by GWPF with some serious academics from the field. None thought it more than a theoretical phsyics research project.
The materials can no handle it, Captain, for a start. Super conductors are a side show. The engineering says no.
Let’s get Gen 2 and Gen 4 working at production volumes and costs first and set a realistic benchmark for fusion. Which will be well under £50/MWh at today’s prices. There is so much riding on trying to stop the development of what worlks best manufactured and deployed at scale, because then the uselessness of renewables and fusion, on every commercial measure, become starkly clear. MIET, MBA
The problem isn’t just creating fusion. But how much of the energy from any kind of millions-of-degrees fusion can you pull back out again into useful electricity as opposed to destroying the apparatus.
The trouble these writers have is distinguishing between science and engineering/technology. We have a pretty good scientific understanding of lots of things – fusion, cancer, quantum physics – but getting from that understanding to fusion power, cancer cures and quantum computing is proving exceedingly difficult.
Fusion will never arrive. I know that sound ludicrous but it is an extremely complex system with demands on plasma containment that will be almost impossible to meet.
If all the money spent on fusion went to LTSR research and develpment we would have all the energy we need
Having read most of this page, from passed knowledge, I don’t see how the ‘cost’ of ‘confinement’ involved with a ‘fusion reactor’ can give a higher rate of ‘energy take-off’ when compared with a ‘fission reactor’.
Why, when we already have the ‘A bomb’ and are a member of ‘the club’ that regulates this, do we continue to attempt this scientific possibility? It beats me!
Kind regards, Ray Dart (AKA suricat).
Ray, ypu don’t understand what academe is about. Its for useless entitled people that don’t want to be measured o the success or value of their work by the peope forced to pay for it by law.
Check the job adds.
Fusion Scientists Wanted: ITER, coming soon to a charming location near Aix en Provence, a short drive to the Alps for skiing and the Mediteranean/Cote d’Azure coast with long matching holidays. Private education funded for children of reserachers at specially built International school. No chance of project completing before retirement. No hard targets or positive generation results required. A guaranteed boondoggle for the privileged, with no value or measurable success required to be demonstrated. Just publish the odd paper to secure tenure. Apply now. Evidence of innate arrogance and sense of entitlement expected.